The invention relates to editing a surface in a computer system.
A polygonal mesh is a set of vertices and connecting edges forming polygonal planar surfaces, and is used in computer graphics for modeling a three-dimensional surface. A surface is rendered from an underlying polygonal mesh by applying a subdivision scheme that refines the mesh and computes new vertex locations as affine combinations of neighboring vertices. The accuracy of the surface created using the subdivision scheme depends on the accuracy with which the polygonal mesh represents the original surface.
Because it has planar surfaces, a polygonal mesh can only approximate a curved surface, although the difference between the polygonal mesh and a curved surface can be made arbitrarily small by using a sufficiently large number of polygonal surfaces. A polygonal mesh having a greater number of polygons, however, requires increased memory storage and processing.